Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies

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Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies

Harriet T. Zurndorfer

To cite this article: Harriet T. Zurndorfer (2018) Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies, NORA - Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, 26:4, 357-366, DOI:

10.1080/08038740.2018.1528998

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REVIEW ESSAY

Waves of Publications on Chinese Women and Gender Studies

Harriet T. Zurndorfer

Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, Netherlands

ABSTRACT

This essay traces the evolution of Chinese women and gender studies in academia since the 1970s through a discussion of a number of prominent Western-language book publications that reveal changing scholarly approaches and attitudes toward this subject. It makes evident that within several generations theﬁeld has developed from a study favoured by left-leaning academics to a subject fed by multi-disciplinary approaches and integral to China scholarship. The review demonstrates how researchers sought sources and means to expose the once-buried literary and artistic achievements of imperial era women while modern history and literary experts as well as anthropologists and other social scientists countered long-standing narratives of women’s oppression, and pursued alternative scenarios to show how Chinese men and women have transformed their culture and society. There is also attention given to publications about masculinity, same-sex cultures, and the one-child policy. The review concludes that more contact between Western and Chinese scholars on women and gender studies will enrich and expand the dimensions of thisﬁeld.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 10 September 2018 Accepted 24 September 2018 KEYWORDS

China; women; gender;

reform era; publication history

The ﬁrst wave: coming of age during the second feminist wave

When I was attending school and university in the 1960s—a time when second-wave feminism was just beginning to gain global media attention—it was quite fashionable to consider the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as the world’s front-runner in women’s liberation. All those posters featuring broadly smiling young“heroines” driving tractors, repairing high-voltage power lines, or mothering happy children inspired confidence that the PRC was a place where “women held up half the sky”. Such ideals roused the first Western visitors and researchers to want access to the country in the 1970s. These scholar-researchers, however—many of whom had been granted limited stays to inves- tigate women, work, and the family at the local level—were disappointed at what they observed, which contrasted strongly with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) rhetoric they had heard before and during their fieldwork. This resulted in the first wave of learned publications about Chinese women being critical of the visible gender inequalities in both the workplace and the home. These studies also reported the sexual

CONTACTHarriet T. Zurndorfer h.zurndorfer@kpnplanet.nl Leiden Institute for Area Studies, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University, 2300 RA Leiden, The Netherlands

NORA—NORDIC JOURNAL OF FEMINIST AND GENDER RESEARCH 2018, VOL. 26, NO. 4, 357–366

https://doi.org/10.1080/08038740.2018.1528998

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://

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imbalance in Chinese public leadership. The titles of these publications pretty much sum up what, according to their American writers, women had achieved under Maoist socialism: The Unﬁnished Liberation of Chinese Women, 1949–1980 (Andors, 1983);

Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China (Stacey, 1983); Revolution Postponed:

Women in Contemporary China (Wolf,1985). To be sure, there were other monographs dating from the same period that were more tempered in their analyses, such as those by British researchers Croll (1978) and Davin (1976), but after the work of these US- based scholars, and others such as Johnson (1983), a certain pessimism about women’s past and future in the PRC took hold in the academy, and this helped to shape scholarship about Chinese women.

A common assumption made by all these publications was that, prior to the twentieth century, all Chinese women, of whatever class or geographical background, were passive and powerless“victims” of a so-called “traditional society”. This simplistic view had already met its ﬁrst challenge in a 1981 anthology (Guisso & Johannesen, 1981) featuring studies covering a broad span of time, from the Six Dynasties (220–518) to the twentieth century, which demonstrated that palace women, Buddhist nuns, and upper-class wives could all be “historical agents” and that female “resistance” (as opposed to “liberation”) was also an enduring element in Chinese women’s history.

Another signiﬁcant publication of this decade was the catalogue of an exhibition documenting the paintings and poetry of 43 learned women active from the fourteenth century onwards (Weidner, Laing, Lo, Chu, & Robinson,1988). It was also during the 1980s that scholars realized that the concept of“gender” had much to oﬀer in unravel- ling the complexities of Chinese societal development over the long term. Contributions to a multi-authored volume on marriage and inequality (Ebrey & Watson,1991), based on a conference held in 1988, made it evident that not taking women as the central subject of investigation and, instead, viewing marriage in relation to political, socio- economic, and gender inequalities over an extended historical era, from earliest times to the twentieth century, helped to bring into high relief the historical variation rather than the uniformity of women’s experiences.

The second wave: new historical frameworks, Republican-era women, and revisionism in the reform era

By the 1990s, interest in Chinese women’s development in both the past and the present had become embedded in Euro-American university curricula. That decade saw an upsurge of scholarship on Chinese women and gender, with three periods being the principal foci: 1500–

1800 (late imperial epoch), theﬁrst half of the twentieth century, and the post-Maoist reform era. The publication of several important conference volumes focusing on engendering Chinese studies of women (Gilmartin, Hershatter, Rofel, & White, 1994), writing women in the Ming Qing period [1368–1911] (Chang & Widmer,1997), and women’s changing roles and status before 1800 (Zurndorfer,1999) stimulated ever more research and writing and the need for a specialized publishing venue. In 1999, I founded the journal publication Nan Nü:

Men, Women and Gender in Early and Imperial China with the goal of providing a forum for both senior and junior scholars to communicate the achievements of their research. Since its ﬁrst few years, the journal, now known as Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, has expanded to include within its chronological scope the twentieth and twenty-ﬁrst centuries,

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and embraces research in the humanities and social sciences related to men, women, and gender matters.

During the 1990s, a vast library of publications emerged in a wide range of disciplines focusing on the period before the twentieth century. Subjects for the pre-twentieth century era included: female rulers, education, religion, work, literary output, painting, law and property, concubines and courtesans, bodily practices (including foot binding), and med- icine (Zurndorfer,2017). The success and vibrancy of Chinese women’s and gender studies may be attributed in part to the high quality of three“foundational” publications which set the standard to follow (Ebrey,1993; Ko,1994; Mann,1997). These works oﬀer frameworks within which to consider how both literary and ordinary women managed their lives, their families, and, not least, their own talents during the imperial era.

Also in the 1990s, the study of women in China during theﬁrst half of the twentieth century and thereafter shifted its focus from the transformative power of the Chinese revolution to the more localized, segmented, and conﬂicting topics that originated out of the country’s transformation from a socialist collective to a neoliberal consumer economy (Bailey,2012; Hershatter,2007). While scholars had previously examined women in the Republican era (1911–1949) with regard to factory work (Hershatter,1986; Honig,1986), the 1990s publications expanded the topics of their inquiries. Gendering China’s “national modernity” is an important theme in a series of books that has revised the earlier CCP narrative, which claimed credit for“liberating” Chinese women. Gilmartin (1995) explores the process through which patriarchy was established in the institutional power structures of the CCP during its formative years, and argues convincingly that the patriarchal gender system proved enduring, even after 1949.

Wang’s (1999) was thefirst study to unravel the mysteries surrounding the promulga- tion of feminist ideals during the May Fourth era (1919–1924), and to link them to the origins of Chinese communism. Another topic pursued by scholars was the world of Shanghai courtesans and brothels during the late Qing (1870s–1911) and Republican eras (Henriot,1997; Hershatter,1997); the latter book offers information on the economy of prostitution with regard to trafficking women. Larson (1998) argues for the persistence of conventional assumptions during the May Fourth period that had historically proscribed female access to public literary culture. The path-breaking study by Evans (1997) of sexuality during the 1950s in the PRC alerts readers to the ways in which women’s sexuality has consistently been a site for government regulation of sexual and social conduct. What these publications signpost is the bridge between late imperial China, the Republican era, and the post-1949 period. The“1949-divide” does not seem so definitive when one considers how influential the forces of patriarchy, government censorship, and commercial sex still are, as is evident in everyday life in the PRC today.

By the 1990s, thefirst effects of the Reform era were becoming evident, and researchers documented the ensuing changes. Based on many years of ethnographic fieldwork in a Hangzhou silk factory beginning in the 1980s, Rofel (1999) investigated the lives and goals of three cohorts of female workers active before, during, and after the Maoist era, who reported respectively their thoughts about“Liberation nostalgia”, “resisting authority” (of the Cultural Revolution period), and the centrality of femininity and motherhood (as opposed to worker identity). The 1990s saw thefirst stage of China’s massive internal migration, when some 100 million rural-based people (of whom approximately 30%–40% were women) left their home districts in search of work in industry or domestic service. Davin (1999) and Lee

NORA—NORDIC JOURNAL OF FEMINIST AND GENDER RESEARCH 359

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(1998) analyse the gender-speciﬁc experiences of women, who often laboured in factories under closely supervised disciplinary regimes but with lower salaries than their male counter- parts. Back in the countryside, women experienced the Reforms negatively, according to two long-term ethnographic studies. Judd (1994) found that the Reforms allowed men to enter managerial positions in both local industry and village politics, which meant that more women had to engage in agriculture, as well as continuing to perform household duties.

Jacka (1997) demonstrated how, as a result of the Reforms, rural-based girls and women underwent an overall decline in their position in relation to boys and men with regard to accessing education, political participation, and well-paying jobs in industry, and were relegated to doing more agricultural tasks than before.

New waves in post-2000 scholarship

It is nearly impossible to select a limited number of topics and do justice to the hundreds of books and thousands of learned articles focusing on Chinese women and gender matters issued since the turn of the millennium. To get an idea of what is available, one may refer to the most complete listing of these publications in Western languages in Yates (2009), updated in Yates and Cai (2018). Looking at the plethora of publications, one mayfind that three broad themes—biography, sexuality and masculinity, and the one-child policy—have been the foci of much research. I cite here only a small fraction of the publications relating to these three themes. In addition, I refer to a number of studies on specific topics that have transported the field of Chinese women and gender matters into new realms of sophistication and intellectual significance.

Biography was an esteemed genre in Chinese writing during the imperial era, but standard biographies of women usually directed attention primarily towards the womanly virtues of family service and chastity. Thus, it is quite remarkable how recently published biographies of individual female writers have transformed conceptions of women’s intellectual, religious, and social achievements in the late imperial era. Fong (2008) shows that women performed as authors, editors, and commentators during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, while Widmer (2006) connects women’s writing with the emergence of the Chinese vernacular novel in the nineteenth century. Grant (2009) analyses the careers of seven female Chan Buddhist masters who helped to reinvent the religion during the late imperial era. In a more recent work, Widmer (2016) delves into the role of families in female-authored literary production during the late nineteenth century. The kinship tie is also a factor in the achievements from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century of three generations of women of the Zhang family, who capably coped with rebellions, reforms, and revolutions, often while male family members were absent (Mann,2007).

Besides these composite biographies, there have also appeared individual biographies of women whose life stories capture how many women deviated from societal expectations.

These monographs include studies of: China’s most renowned female poet, Li Qingzhao (1084–ca. 1151) by Egan (2014); a well-known eighteenth-century woman poet of peasant origins (Ropp, 2001); and China’s ﬁrst female revolutionary and feminist, Qiu Jin (1875–1907) by Hu (2016). Autobiographical writing practices of women in twentieth- century China are the subject of L. Wang’s (2004) study, while Huang (2018) recounts three generations of Chinese women’s experiences of life in Maoist and post-Maoist China, and blends individual stories with the shifting relationships between class and gender from 1949

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to the present day. In addition, two volumes based on conference papers contain superb analyses of individual life stories from the early imperial era to the late twentieth century (Dauncey & Dryburgh,2013; Judge & Hu,2011).

Studies of sexuality may be traced to a number of scholars who, in the 1980s, turned to the work of Michel Foucault (which scrutinized sexuality primarily in Western civilization) to seek ways of developing a framework for the speciﬁc historical and cultural dimensions of sexuality in China. Rejecting the studies of the Dutch scholar Robert van Gulik (1910–- 1967), which relied on a positivist medical approach to the subject, they referred to Chinese cultural constructs intertwined with notions of gender to create an intellectual alternative.

Aside from the ancient sexual manuals unearthed in archaeological research since the 1970s, which allowed Goldin (2002) to demonstrate that pre-imperial Chinese attitudes towards women were more diverse and multi-faceted than the most common confucian interpretations would lead one to conclude, evidence of same-sex relations in literary and legal texts stimulated studies of both female and male homosexuality (Sang,2003; Vitiello, 2011). Sommer (2000), in an examination of the regulation of sexuality (heterosexual and homosexual) during the Qing dynasty, found that male homosexuality was considered a threat to patriarchal authority, and therefore sodomy was criminalized.

Often treated as an emblem of Chinese sexuality, foot binding was also, as Ko (2005) emphasizes in her revisionist history of the practice, a form of female self- representation, symbolic of the diligence and obedience expected of elite women. In her survey of gender and sexuality, covering developments from late imperial times to the present, all social classes and both urban and rural society (including ethnic minorities), Mann (2011) argues for a continuity between past and present with regard to state regulation of sexual attitudes and practices. The emergence of urban same-sex cultures since the 1990s has been the subject of several studies (Engebretsen,2013; Kam, 2013; Liu, 2015; Zheng,2015). One may assume that the increased social and geographical mobility of individuals since the 1990s has provided Chinese men and women with exposure to global gay and lesbian culture, while the force for heteronormativity has shifted from government control of private life to surveillance by parents and colleagues at work (Liu, 2017).

Interest in Chinese masculinity began only in the late twentieth century, after the field of Chinese women’s studies was already firmly established. Studies of men in the imperial era by Rouzer (2001), Song (2004), and Huang (2006) locate Chinese masculinity within the realms of scholarly attainment and moral uprightness, while Louie (2002) focuses on martial heroism as a defining characteristic alongside cultural achievement. Hinsch (2013) surveys changing concepts of masculinity in China from earliest times to the present. Three important ethnographic studies of men and masculinities in the present day are those by Song and Hird (2014), Osburg (2013), and Uretsky (2015), in which each author discusses how China’s neoliberal economy affects male behaviour and gender relations.

The one-child policy, first enacted in 1979 under extraordinary circumstances (Greenhalgh, 2008), has been the subject of several monographs issued since 2000 that have examined its long-term effects. It is now realized that this policy, implemen- ted in principle to control population growth, which the government deemed to be undermining national development, represented a massive intrusion into women’s conjugal lives. In rural areas, where resistance to the programme was fierce, it made

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family life problematic (White, 2006). In urban areas, the one-child policy, as Fong (2004) argues, boosted the appreciation of daughters, but also fuelled much personal frustration, strained family relations, and endangered the demographic “replacement level”, which in the long run has rendered the care of the elderly problematic. In some rural districts, parents involuntarily abandoned their“extra” children, many of whom ended up in orphanages subject to sale by domestic human traﬃckers or to “legal”

international adoption (Johnson, 2016). Johnson’s work demonstrates how these orphan girl children were not rejected by misogynistic parents but were pawns in a government policy that sundered families. Nowadays, as Shi (2017) has convincingly shown, rural parents’ long-standing bias in favour of sons has given way to a new and greater appreciation of daughters, whom they believe will be better care-givers for their old age than male oﬀspring, who are known to cost a great deal in terms of education and marriage—men are expected to oﬀer their brides a house and a car as part of the bride-price—and then move away from the natal home to towns and cities for work.

Aside from these publications, mention should be made of a number of important works that are distinguished for their use of newly available archival materials or for their originality in terms of approach and methodology. For the imperial era, both Birge (2002) and Bossler (2013) showed how centuries of contact with highly militarized steppe societies affected Chinese gender relations: not only did Chinese men consider themselves superior to the invaders, but they enforced rules on their female relatives, such as the institutionalization of the widow chastity cult, to distinguish Chinese women from those of the invader, denying them their own property rights in the process. Other significant publications in this new millennium include Edwards (2008) on the history of Chinese women’s suffrage; Judge (2015) on the role of women’s magazines in the transition between late Qing China and the early Republic; Finnane (2007) on the development of China’s changing clothing styles over the last 200 years; Wang (2011) on Chinese women’s cinema; and,finally, Gaetano (2015) on rural women migrants.

Concluding remarks

The surge of publications on Chinese women and gender issues is evidence that this subject is integral to China studies and cannot be dismissed as“supplementary”. Within just a few generations, the ﬁeld has developed from a study favoured by left-leaning academics to a subject fed by multi-disciplinary approaches and integral to China scholarship. No longer do scholars ask whether the twentieth-century Communist revolution was good for women; instead, they want to know how to make women visible, and what this conspicuousness means for understanding gender relations in China. In itsﬁrst stages, scholars sought sources and means to expose the once-buried literary and artistic achievements of imperial-era women, while modern history and literary experts, as well as anthropologists and other social scientists, countered long- standing narratives of women’s oppression and pursued alternative scenarios in which Chinese men and women have transformed their culture and society. This review essay has focused only on Western-language publications. Admittedly, whatever appreciation the authors cited here profess for Chinese-language scholarship, their insights and framing devices are more likely to represent the concerns and conversations about men, women, and gender in their own academic milieus than that of the Chinese

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scholarly world. But the contours of both academic domains are open to each other, and, as theﬁeld continues to expand, there will be more contact and opportunities to explore the dimensions of Chinese gender studies in both locales.

Disclosure statement

No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Harriet T. Zurndorfer (Ph.D. 1977 from the University of California, Berkeley in Chinese history) is an Aﬃliated Fellow of the Leiden Institute for Area Studies in the Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University in the Netherlands where she has worked as a docent and researcher since 1978. She is the author of Change and Continuity in Chinese Local History (1989), and China Bibliography: A Research Guide to Reference Works about China Past and Present (1995), and has published more than 200 learned articles and reviews. From 1992 to 2000, she served as editor-in-chief of The Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient. She is founder, and editor-in-chief of the journal Nan Nü: Men, Women and Gender in China, published since 1999. She also serves as one of the co-editors of the 4-volume Cambridge World History of Violence, and is a contributor to the forthcoming Cambridge Economic History of China.

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